Canyon R

No it doesn’t make thousands of Julienne fries

I understand the problem everyone is having with Google Wave. I really do. From cries of “I don’t get it” to “This isn’t going to replace email” there is a roar of dissatisfaction with the initial release of Google Wave. I think this comes from people trying to set it into their current modes and methods. Wave doesn’t really replace any existing product completely. Wave won’t kill twitter or get you away from email. But I think Leo Laporte put it best on several of his Netcasts “Maybe for a paradigm shift it needs to be a product that we don’t get initially”. This sums up the disconnect many people feel with Wave. They have a hard time fitting Wave into their current view of work and communication because it isn’t the same as the tools they have used before.

Just as “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” holds true for situations with a lack of tools, I believe that once you get a screwdriver you don’t ask “how do i use this to drive nails”. A new tool can complement, rather than replace, existing ones. A new tool can both give you a better solution to existing problems (not inserting screws by hitting them really hard) and give you new capabilities that the old tools didn’t (you can remove screws as well). I think this is the state of Google Wave. It’s a tool that will make some current processes better, not emailing 12 versions of word documents back and forth, and allow new ones to be developed. This second part is what really excites me, what new things will we start to do with wave once it finds it’s place in our current workflows. How will we leverage it’s unique many to many, real time model to create things we couldn’t easily create before. All of the wonderful examples in the oft linked Lifehacker article are using wave for things that are currently accomplished with existing communication tools, most using one to one or one to many methods (ie. phone calls or email). And while I think that wave will be a great new tool in these areas, I really want to see what things will we use it for that we aren’t doing today because the existing tools fall too short to be workable.

So yes it slices, and you can use it for dicing if you want, but it won’t make thousands of Julienne fries. It may, however, help you create a new way to carve up your work.